1. Technical Field
The claimed subject matter relates generally to semiconductor chips and, more specifically, to a method for facilitating the evaluation of a return material authorization chip.
2. Description of the Related Art
Components of semiconductor chips, or “chips modules,” are typically manufactured in batches on wafers in which multiple dies are created and then separated for combination with other dies on a chip substrate. Over the past forty years, the design and manufacture of semiconductor chips have become increasing complicated as the chip modules have become smaller and more powerful. For example, a current chip module may have millions of transistors in the space occupied by one transistor forty years ago. Over the years, chip modules have gotten smaller and more powerful as both the number of dies produced on a particular wafer, the number of transistors on a particular die and the number of die mounted on a particular substrate have increased.
Each die and semiconductor chip must be tested before being released into the market. However, some flaws may be latent and may not be apparent in the initial testing stages. A latent defect may become worse over time and has the potential to create a chip failure that is observed by a customer. A return material authorization chip (RMA) is a die and the portion of the wafer substrate on which the die is mounted that has been returned to the manufacturer because the chip module failed to work properly in the customer environment. Of course, the increased number of dies on a particular substrate and increased transistor density increase the possibility that a latent defect may occur and the difficulty of analyzing the defective chip module.
A RMA, also know as “field returns,” must be analyzed by an engineer or group of engineers to determine why the defective chip module did not perform to specification. This analysis typically must be performed with limited or no knowledge of such factors as the original location of a corresponding die on the manufacturing wafer, the operating condition of the chip module up to the time of failure and the customer's environment, such as the temperature at which the chip module was operated. This lack of knowledge ultimately ends up prolonging the time required for engineers to debug and find the root cause of the problem. In other words, valuable time is often lost simply establishing a starting point for the debugging of an RMA or other chip analysis.
Some single and multiprocessor servers include a separate processor that collects data on each of the other processors. However, when a processor is returned from such a single or multiprocessor server, the information collected by the separate processor is not included. In other words, even with respect to a server that collects processor data, a RMA does not include information that enables an engineer to debug an individual chip module.
Another issue with current chip design is that there is no way to determine the amount of usage corresponding to a chip module. This information could be useful for consumers when purchasing or maintaining products. For example, two similar devices, e.g. game devices, may be six months old and for sale. However, one of the devices may have been used a very small amount of time over the six months while the other device was used continuously. This information might be useful to a user determining which of the two game devices to purchase. Currently, there is no simple method for determining an amount of usage to which a particular electronic device has been subjected.